Subject Line: Capability Gardens Trusts: Festival Update, June 2016
[CGT activities spreadsheet attached]
It feels like a summer of Capability is just around the corner and, as always, there’s lots going on. Caroline attended the recent CBF Board meeting, and all the latest information is included below.
We’re also hearing reports of successful CGT CB events taking place all over the country. Gilly Drummond reports that she had a marvellous time at Northamptonshire Gardens Trust’s Castle Ashby event in May (pictured), Suffolk Gardens Trust’s Study Day at Heveningham Hall on 15 July sold out within two weeks of tickets going on sale and attracted many members who do not normally attend events, andEssex Garden Trust’s Brown conference at Saffron Waldenwas praised as a very good close focus on one county.
Do continue to keep us informed of your events, activities and research. We’ve attached a spreadsheet of CGT activities which we’re compiling as the year progresses, based on your responses to our initial questionnaire. Please have a look and send us details to fill in any gaps. We hope the spreadsheet will provide a comprehensive record of all we have achieved, and will show how we’ve worked beyond the Festival aims, while capitalising on the publicity and interest generated by it.
Festival Patron
Lord Forteviot was officially announced as the Festival’s Patron at the launch of the ‘Empress and the Gardener’ exhibition at Hampton Court Palace. The exhibition features the original Cosway portrait from Lord Forteviot’s collection, which has become the face of Capability Brown for the Festival by his kind permission.
Owners’ Manual and EducationPack now available
‘A Manual for Owners: Opening Your Garden or Landscape to the Public’ has been commissioned by the Festival team and produced by heritage development and design company Tricolor. It’s worth having a look, not least for the information provided in the five detailed appendices covering Recruiting Volunteers, Interpretation, Audience Development, PR and Marketing, and Evaluation.
The Education Pack, produced by education consultant Neil Dymond-Green, is predominantly aimed at children aged between 7 and 11 (Key Stage 2), but also includes ideas and information about working with families. It can be downloaded as a complete resource, or in sections, and features a host of practical worksheets and templates.
Both are available as free downloads from the Festival website can be kept as a useful resource for future CGT events and activities beyond the Festival year, when we’ve all moved on from Capability Brown!
Leaflet maps
The first batch of leaflet maps, for the Hub sites, is now in the pipeline and the process for the other sites is soon to be rolled out. This will take a slightly different form, due to the complexity of producing a bespoke map for each site. It is proposed that the other sites will have a downloadable leaflet with a description of Brown’s involvement at the site written in an accessible style to attract new audiences (as originally planned, but without the map), and there will now also be the facility to link this to more in-depth research records written by CGTs and others, which can be added as new information becomes available and research is written up. As we will no longer be working to the deadline of the Festival designers, this will give us greater flexibility to add our research when it is completed and we can include longer reports than before. It’s becoming increasingly apparentthat the recording and disseminating of research is being seen as an integral part of the Festival legacy documentation. The Festival team need to discuss the proposed changes to the leaflet map concept with the HLF, so we’ll keep you updated on what has been agreed.
Festival website and blog
We reported in the last update the news that there is now a dedicated page on the Gardens Trust website for CGT Capability Brown publications, with details of how to obtain copies. Hopefully this has increased awareness of the professionalism and research capabilities of CGTs, as well as promoting sales. The CBF team have now put a link on their website to this page ( which should boost awareness even more. Do let us know how your publications are selling and if you have a publication you would like us to promote.
We’ve written a news blog entry which will appear in the CBF online newsletter and will be published on the CBF website. The blog introduces the research, publications and other great work being produced by CGTs and we would like to follow this up with further blog posts from CGTs. These couldgive an overview of Brown landscapes in your county or focus on a particular site or interesting snippet of research. Each blog post is around 350 words long – have a look at the website ( to get an idea of the type of post others have written. The festival team are really keen to highlight CGT research and have a captive audience waiting to hear from us! If you’d like to contribute to promote your research and publications, send us your articles and we’ll arrange for them to be added to the website.
Skills Sharing Seminar
The Festival will be working in partnership with the RHS Lindley Library to deliver a Skills Sharing Seminar based around Brown’s account book, identifying 18th century handwriting and exploring the wider 18th century collection available to researchers in the library. This will take place in September or October to coincide with the first ever exhibition of the newly conserved account book in the new exhibition space at the library (details of exhibition below). We’ll pass on further details about the seminar when we hear more.
Publications
The latest edition of the New Arcadian Journal, Yorkshire Capabilities, explores the Yorkshire landscapes designed by Capability Brown with articles by Patrick Eyres, Karen Lynch, John Phibbs and LinziStauvers. Copies can be ordered at
We were delighted to hear that Sarah Rutherford’s book Capability Brown and his Landscape Gardens, published last month, has sold out already – proof that there’s an eager audience for garden history books and lots of interest in the subject for us to tap into. If you haven’t got your copy yet, fear not, more are on their way.
Press and media
Interest in the festival from the press continues to grow, with coverage across the spectrum from glossy magazines to tabloid newspapers. Impressively, there have been 632 press and media pieces so far, which have reached an audience of just under 400 million people! BBC Radio 4’s flagship cultural programme Front Row broadcast an entire programme on Capability Brown, which you can listen to at and Capability Brown was even a subject on Radio 4’s Just a Minute! The festival’s social media presence is also growing, with the target of 3,000 Twitter followers likely to have been reached by the time you read this.
John Phibbs’ list
The4th version of John Phibbs’A list of landscapes that have been attributed to ‘Capability’ Brownhas recently been published and can be accessed at Helpfully, the updated sections have been highlighted in yellow so you can easily see where changes have been made. The exhaustive work of many CGTs and individual researchers within CGTs has been acknowledged in the introduction, reflecting the great combined achievement of our research.
Many of you will already be aware of John Phibbs’ blog which he has committed to answering 300 frequently asked questions about Capability Brown. You can sign up to be notified of each new post to ensure you get your regular fix of Brown.
What’s On – a few snippets of current and future events
If you couldn’t make it to London for the World Monuments Fund lecture by Oliver Cox, ‘Clumps and Concrete: 300 years of Lancelot Capability Brown’, you can watch it at
‘Lenses on a Landscape Genius’ at The Building Centre in London brings together leading photographers to explore and celebrate the work of Capability Brown, 22 June to 29 July
Dorset Gardens Trust and NADFAS have collaborated on a Capability Brown Day at Milton Abbey on 11 July, with John Phibbs, including a tour of the exhibition 'A Capability Brown Experience' (10 July - 21 August)
A round-up of six major Capability Brown conferences taking place this year with details of how to book
John Spyersexquisite watercolours are among the exhibits at ‘The Empress and the Gardener’ at Hampton CourtPalace until 4 September
A chance to see Brown’s account book as part of the exhibition ‘A Capable Businessman’ at Lindley Library 5 September to 28 October
Watch a clip from Lincolnshire Gardens Trust showing the delightful carriage rides at Burghley